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A couple weekends ago, I made the requisite annual trek to RARSfest, my local hamfest of choice, which takes place on the NC State Fairgrounds. You might remember my in-depth slideshow on a similar hamfest adventure two years ago. Well, this year I decided to take a few shots of the ‘fest again, and I […]

In Part I of “Inside a Hamfest: An Annotated Slideshow,” I gave you an introduction to hamfests. In Part II, I told you about guys who try to sell utterly useless crap for too much money, but I also found some choice non-crap to purchase for very little money. We also met a Simpsons-like supernerd […]

In Part I of “Inside a Hamfest: An Annotated Slideshow,” I went through an introduction about amateur radio enthusiasts (hams), hamfests in general, and a bit about hams’ hacker-like ethos. Then, during the slideshow, I arrived at the hamfest, surveyed the scene, and made at least one major find. Below, in Part II of the […]

Those of you who have been reading VC&G for some time have probably encountered the occasional mention of “hamfests” in accounts of my collecting adventures. Contrary to what you might think, hamfests have little to do with pork (we here in NC call that a pig pickin’), but a lot to do with amateur radio. […]

I have a box of about eight musty, “doorstop quality” Commodore 64’s (C64) and VIC-20’s sitting up in my attic. They came from a local hamfest a few years ago. It was getting late in the show that day and the vendors were tired and wanted to go home. At the end of any hamfest, […]

Large and in charge Well over a decade ago, I picked up a Lanier Model 103 No Problem word processor system (ca. 1978) and a matching daisy wheel printer for free from a local hamfest. I was lucky enough to get disks for it too, so I could boot it up and play around with […]

An authentic, Coke-stained programming reference I’m sure I’ve told this story somewhere else — probably about five times at this point, but here it goes again. When I was maybe 9 or 10 (in 1990 or 1991), my dad bought me a nice Apple II+ setup from someone at the local hamfest for about $100. […]

[ Earlier this year, I asked readers what they wanted to see on VC&G’s tenth anniversary. Most people said “behind the scenes coverage,” but I wasn’t sure how to approach that. So I asked my longtime editing partner Harry McCracken to interview me in the hopes that I might accidentally say something interesting about the […]

A Cybiko ad spoofing stereotypical Japanese zaniness. The Cybiko was a bizarre handheld device of mixed lineage: I’d call it 1/3 game console and 2/3 handheld PC. It sought to be a PDA for kids, so it incorporated both gaming and organizer software. It also included a very novel feature at the time: wireless connectivity. […]

“Play slots anywhere you go without the expense!” I believe I bought this Radio Shack LCD Mini Slot Machine unit at a hamfest back in the 1990s. The game broke not too long afterward, but I apparently kept the box and the manual. Fast forward 15 years later. I recently discovered the box in a […]